The Vegetarian: A Novel

The Man Booker International Prize, 2016. Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams - invasive images of blood and brutality - torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It's a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home.

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness

Korea's brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Korea's industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Korea's economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shin's heroine who formed the bottom of Seoul's rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.

I'll Be Right There: A Novel

Set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution, I'll Be Right There follows Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life.

Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite

Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST).

The Housekeeper and the Professor

He is a brilliant math professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper - with a 10-year-old son-who is hired to care for the professor. And every morning, as the professor and the housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

A Man Called Ove

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon - the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him "the bitter neighbor from hell". But behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness.

Britt-Marie Was Here: A Novel

Britt-Marie can't stand mess. She eats dinner at precisely the right time and starts her day at six in the morning because only lunatics wake up later than that. And she is not passive-aggressive. Not in the least. It's just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But at 63, Britt-Marie has had enough. She finally walks out on her loveless 40-year marriage and finds a job in the only place she can: Borg, a small, derelict town devastated by the financial crisis.

The Calligrapher's Daughter: A Novel

In early-20th-century Korea, Najin Han, the privileged daughter of a calligrapher, longs to choose her own destiny. Smart and headstrong, she is encouraged by her mother---but her stern father is determined to maintain tradition, especially as the Japanese steadily gain control of his beloved country. When he seeks to marry Najin into an aristocratic family, her mother defies generations of obedient wives and instead sends her to serve in the king's court as a companion to a young princess.

Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.… So begins the story in this exquisite debut novel about a Chinese American family living in a small town in 1970s Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos.

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire

The Mongol queens of the 13th century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father’s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos: A Novel

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel

Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of a boy who ends up murdering seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his 16th birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage, in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

In Order to Live is the story of Yeonmi Park's struggle to survive in the darkest, most repressive country on earth; her harrowing escape to South Korea through China's underworld of smugglers and human traffickers; and her emergence as a leading human rights activist - all before her 21st birthday.

The Underground Railroad (Oprah's Book Club)

The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood - where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned - Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

Commonwealth

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

The Plague of Doves

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.

This is Innovative language Learning. This Audiobook will take you through the basics of Korean with Basic Bootcamp, All About, and Pronunciation lessons. The five Basic Bootcamp lessons each center on a practical, real-life conversation. At the beginning of the lesson, we'll introduce the background of the conversation. In the fifteen All About lessons, you'll learn all about Korean and Korea.

Today Will Be Different

Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action - life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office - but not Eleanor - that he's on vacation.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question....

A Little Life: A Novel

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.

Did You Ever Have A Family

On the eve of her daughter's wedding, June Reid's life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter's fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke - her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor.

Norwegian Wood

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over four million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.

The Girl Before

Clara Lawson is torn from her life in an instant. Without warning, her home is invaded by armed men, and she finds herself separated from her beloved husband and daughters. The last thing her husband yells to her is to say nothing. In chapters that alternate between past and present, the novel slowly unpeels the layers of Clara's fractured life. We see her growing up, raised with her sisters by the stern Mama and Papa G, becoming a poised and educated young woman, falling desperately in love with the forbidden son of her adoptive parents.

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual

With over 500,000 readers a month at her enormously popular blog, AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi is a go-to source for smart takes on pop culture. I'm Judging You is her debut book of humorous essays that dissects our cultural obsessions and calls out bad behavior in our increasingly digital, connected lives - from the importance of the newest Shonda Rhimes television drama to serious discussions of race and media representation to what to do about your fool cousin sharing casket pictures from Grandma's wake on Facebook.

Audible Editor Reviews

In Please Look After Mom, Kyung-Sook Shin has delivered a stark, beautiful book about the loss of a mother and the complexity of family relationships, all set against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing South Korea. Her simple but moving prose is presented elegantly, with just a touch of magical realism.

When their elderly mother accidently disappears into the crowded streets of Seoul, the family bands together to try to track her down. Her country upbringing, illiteracy, and mild dementia don't make the task easy and, for most of the novel, we are left crossing our fingers, hoping that the fliers, newspaper ads, and occasional tips will return her safe and sound.

Shin takes a unique stance on structure and grammar, as different members of the family tell their own versions of the story in second-person narrative. At first, the second-person can seem foreign and awkward, but eventually this lifts to reveal a feeling of intimacy.

The rotating voices give a 360 degree holistic view of the event, revealing new details while allowing the family to be at once its parts and the sum of its parts. Perspectives shift from sibling to sibling to father to, eventually, mom herself.

Narrators Mark Bramhall, Samantha Quan, Janet Song, and Bruce Turk do a beautiful, graceful job inhabiting these characters, bringing to the performance all their feelings of fear, guilt, shame, and regret. The narration holds cohesively as the work of an ensemble. They all come together miraculously well, making the story seem more like a play than a series of intertwined vignettes. The multiple voices also complement the text, written and translated (by Chi-Young Kim) with sparse language and frequent pauses to accentuate the spaces in between the thoughts. Bramhall's performance as the patriarch of the family is particularly moving. His narration is low, remorseful, exhausted, and dejected, as his character is forced to acknowledge that he has mistreated his wife and taken her for granted.

The story touches upon many major themes: loss of tradition, rural flight, the rise of urban culture, the de-emphasis of the importance of family, female endurance, and, most centrally, the role of mothers in society. At its most rational, Please Look After Mom is a critique on a shifting South Korea. At its most emotional, it's an ode to all the unsung good mothers of the world. Gina Pensiero

Publisher's Summary

A million-plus-copy best seller in South Korea and poised to become an international sensation, Please Look After Mom is the stunning, deeply moving story of a family’s search for their mother, and of the desires, heartaches, and secrets they discover she harbored within.< /p>

On a family visit to the city, Mom is right behind her husband when the train pulls out of Seoul Station without her, and she is lost, possibly forever. As her children argue over how to find her and her husband returns to their countryside home to wait for her, they each recall their lives with her, their memories often more surprising than comforting. Have they lived up to her expectations? Was she happy? Through the piercing voices of daughter, son, and husband, and through Mom’s own words in the novel’s shattering conclusion, we learn what happened that day, and explore an even deeper mystery—of motherhood itself.

At once steeped in the beauty and complexities of the East and rich with a universal tenderness, Please Look After Mom has a revelatory emotional power. You will never think of your mother the same way again after you’ve heard this book.

I didn't read it in Korean, my mother tongue, because I thought it was one of just tear-gas drama. I got this audiobook because I wanted to see if the translation was all right as the media say. The second-person narrative at first was hard to take but having listened it through I realized that was indeed the ingenious part of the novel. Even though this is not an ordinary page-turner style of novel with a classical plot which makes you climb up to the climax or dramatic ending, and it is about Korean woman whose life was simply an ordeal dictated by contemporary Korean history which may make it hard to understand for ordinary listeners, it is a timeless tribute to every mother and her dedication to her children.
Author said she decided to write one in her teens for her Mom sleeping exhausted in the night train heading for a big city for the hope of the author's career, and my mom declared it a “must-see” for her daughter after seeing the musical of this novel recently. Kudos for author, translator, editors, and the narrators.

What would you do if your mother suddenly disappeared? And how would it make you feel: Guilty? Helpless? Exhausted? Kyung-Sook Shin poses this question in her power-packed and emotionally-gripping novel exploring the desires and heartaches of motherhood – and one family’s relationship with their mom.

The excellent narrator cast brings to life the voices of each family member and expertly navigates Shin’s unique second-person point of view. While this perspective takes getting used to, it’s worth the effort. This is a beautiful and life-changing novel that deserves all the praise and awards it’s won so far.

I listened to the Audible version of this book while reading it. The narrators: Mark Bramhall, Samantha Quan, Janet Song, Bruce Turk lent the book their voices and hearts.

I don't know who suggested for me to read this. Thank you, whoever you are. Obviously, it was very important to me to read it as I did the full search on the library-site and then, when I didn't find the library's audio version, I downloaded the audible to listen while reading.

When I first began reading I was a little put off and confused by the use of "you" as if the character was talking to him or herself. I don't know if that was a tool the author employed or if it resulted from translation, or a combination of the two. Once I got used to the tactic I fell into the thoughts of each of the characters readily.

I think this is an important book for all people to read. It reminds us to think of the "back-story" of the people around you, that you love and possibly take for granted. As an author, I think of the birth and childhood and daily thoughts of my own characters to breathe life into them. But I think I should pursue the real people in my world. Even if we are in the same situation we see each other and the situation through our own filters. What don't we know of others that we never seem to find the time to find out?

At first, the writing was a little annoying in that the author/reader referred to herself in the third person, but I got over that. I like the way several family members got their chance to tell the story from their perspective. While they were all reminiscing and peeling layers off the family and their memories of mom, the story kept moving forward. I feel like I got some insight into this family and I keep thinking of them from time to time. That, to me, is a good book - one I remember long after I have read it.

I tossed in bed in the wee hours of this morning, thinking about this story and wondering what I could say in my review to convey what it meant to me. That is not always easy and too many superlatives can be off-putting. I had been tossing around the idea of listening to this audio book for a long time and only recently acquired it, figuring it was about time.

In summary, the elderly "Mom" of the family gets left behind on a subway platform in Seoul, Korea. She was supposed to be following behind her husband and he never bothered to look behind him until the train was pulling away. It appears Mom may be in the early stages of Alzheimer's, although her family is in denial and seemingly unaware of this. In addition, Mom has other untreated medical problems which might make her return and even her survival more complicated.

The book is written from four points of view after mom goes missing--a daughter, a son, her husband, and mom, herself. It is oddly written in the second person in a way I never encountered before. I didn't mind it at all, once I realized what was occurring. This is a translation and I do not expect it to sound like standard English. For me, it worked just fine.

This book gradually took hold of my heart. Mom's son, daughter, and husband had a lot of time to ruminate, as they scrambled to try to find her. Each one had their own recriminations, regrets, insights and memories of Mom. Each felt like they didn't really know or truly appreciate Mom, who had been the backbone of the family, always there to cater to their needs, seemingly selfless. But Mom was not quite as selfless as everyone believed and had kept some mysteries and secrets of her own. Her longstanding, secret friendship with a neighbor was one of the most touching parts of the story for me.

Mom is one of the four voices in this story. I hesitate to describe this further for fear of spoiling the story for you. Listen carefully. Then come to your own conclusions.

This is a beautiful, incredibly touching story (with a bit of magical realism) that will remain with me for a very long time. It deserves and calls for a great deal of attention, which I regret I did not fully give it. For that reason and because it is such a relevant, unusual story, I will listen to it a second time.

This was not a book I would have chosen on my own, but I read it as it was my book club's choice for the month. I found the story to be deeply moving and a wonderful choice for a book club discussion. The author uses several narrators, mostly members of the missing woman's family, to tell the woman's story and the way her life affected theirs. Beautifully touching.

An elderly married couple travel by train from the rural village they live in to the vast city of Seoul. Their birthdays fall close together, so the family has taken to throwing a joint birthday celebration for them over the years. Each year the couple comes to the vast capital, which is the second largest metropolitan area with in the world, for this celebration.

Arriving at Seoul station, the couple transfers to the needed subway line; but as the doors close, and the train begins to move, the husband realizes that his wife is not with him; she has been left behind.

And here we begin our story, told from 5 different points of view in 5 separate sections of the book. We follow the family as they search for their mother; a mother who has Alzheimer's; a mother that never learned to read. We stay with them as they walk through this city of 25 million people, looking for only one; and as the search continues, the full story of this woman’s life unfolds. Each narrator knows something the others don’t. Each has a unique set of stories and regrets; and as the reader, the full weight of each are put slowly and painfully on our shoulders.

In the penultimate section of the book, we finally get to hear from the mother herself. We find what really transpired that day, and how she views her own life. More secrets are given to our care.

This is a story I’ll never forget, and I have to admit to calling my own mother as soon as it was over, to repeat again how much I love her. The story is nothing if not a cautionary tale of the damage done by things left unsaid.

I remember wanting to read this book when the English translation was first released in print, but then forgot about it. Then it came up in a pop-up ad on another site, and my interest was piqued once again.

As many of my previous reviews have indicated, I do like family and relationship dissonance, dysfunction and ambivalence as bases for a story, and many of my favorite reads have explored this arena of human interaction from a variety of angles, and using a variety of plot situations and narrative techniques. But I thought this was a little heavy on the emotional introspection, with not enough emphasis on the story. Or put another way, for my taste, the evolution of present-day relationships was explored too much from the past, in terms of backstories, and I wanted to hear more about how the siblings actually went about finding Mom. I realized all along that actually finding Mom was not the main point of the story, and that the book was more about exploring a family from the inside, from various points of view, and in various voices.

Bottom line is, I wish there was more time/space devoted to the present and less on the past, and I thought the backstories were too slow - for me, anyway. Sometimes, depending on how a book is constructed, it's possible to fast-forward to what interests me if I get really frustrated with how the story is moving, but this book kept alternating between past and present with very fluid motion and one could easily miss some unexpectedly wonderful insights by skipping parts.

The various narrative voices did not bother or confuse me, as I have read a few successful (IMO) novels using the second person. Seems to be a focus that's being explored by some writers. The narrators were all excellent and interpreted each character perfectly (another IMO); I have always loved listening to Mark Bramhall, and perhaps not so coincidentally, he is one of the narrators in "The Night Strangers" by Chris Bohjalian, another novel that's partially in the second person.

Haunting and gripping story of the missing person; a wife, a grandmother, a mother-in-law, a sister-in-law, and most of all - a mother, whom means everything to the kids. Moving story on remorse, lifetime taken for granted, realization of precious moments (only once there are lost).

I couldn't imagine the pain that would be felt if this actually happened, but it isn't that far fetched. Often you can hear news reports of an elderly person walking away from a retirement home, but the heartbreak doesn't play out as well as when a child is missing. In this book you can feel the pain of the family as they realize the details of their missing mother. They describe how they'd taken her for granted, gotten angry at her, abused her, and ignored the truth about her coming age and illness. The past is described in such detail, you live their lives; each member of the family, and know the regret, the resentment, the heartbreak that Mom must have felt all her life. But as mothers do, she kept it hidden in her deepest parts of her heart.